


Tendons Too Torn to Beg

by hopeless_eccentric



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Depression, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Injury, Mutual Pining, Other, Pining, Post Episode: s02e01-02 Juno Steel and the Kitty Cat Caper, Requited Love, Self-Hatred, nureyev ends up in a rough patch and has nowhere else to turn, this takes place some time in early season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-17 08:55:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28971681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hopeless_eccentric/pseuds/hopeless_eccentric
Summary: When Juno came home and found Peter Nureyev on his couch, he assumed he was dreaming. He was probably better off that way.However, dreams didn’t curse at him under their breath in a language Juno couldn’t place. Dreams didn’t reek of blood and rain and blaster fire. Dreams didn’t cut through the vague, blue-tinged gray left when Juno’s curtains tried and failed to hold back the bustling Hyperion City night with a glare so potent Juno felt something twinge in his chest.
Relationships: Peter Nureyev/Juno Steel
Comments: 36
Kudos: 140





	Tendons Too Torn to Beg

**Author's Note:**

> mAN im not usually someone who does angst but Hell Yeah this kinda went off
> 
> Content warnings for depression, injury, blood, minor depictions of first aid, references to alcoholism/alcohol dependency, self hatred

When Juno came home and found Peter Nureyev on his couch, he assumed he was dreaming. He was probably better off that way.

The last time he dreamt of Peter Nureyev, he smiled that sharp toothed smile and kissed him breathless and told him he didn’t deserve a second of it. Juno knew he was dreaming then, for the world around was black and hazy, condensed to just the two of them in the way it always was when they occupied the same space. However, the rest of the world was not blurred and bright and beautiful. It lurked just out of sight, counting breaths until Juno woke up alone once more.

However, dreams didn’t curse at him under their breath in a language Juno couldn’t place. Dreams didn’t reek of blood and rain and blaster fire. Dreams didn’t cut through the vague, blue-tinged gray left when Juno’s curtains tried and failed to hold back the bustling Hyperion City night with a glare so potent Juno felt something twinge in his chest.

If he were dreaming, he doubted he could feel his hand tight on the door behind him or the way the rain had left his fingers damp and rubbing together uncomfortably as they twitched and fiddled upon his coat once the door was closed. He wouldn’t be able to fathom a new scent of cologne from somewhere behind the sickly iron stench of blood, smelling of melancholy and spice and bottled nostalgia. He wouldn’t be able to perfectly render Peter Nureyev’s voice in a way that made something in him crumple.

“Hello, Juno,” he tried and failed to smile.

“What the hell are you doing in my apartment?”

“What are you going to do?” Nureyev returned flatly. “Are you going to arrest me, detective?”

“Look—“

The scent of blood and his common sense hit him in a wave. He was too damn tired for animosity, even if Nureyev seemed hellbent on it.

“Juno, d—“ Nureyev broke himself off, whether out of shame or fury or the need to stifle a noise of pain behind his fist, Juno could not tell. “I don’t have time for apologies, whether or not you wish to give them to me. I’m afraid I’ve found myself in a rather compromising position.”

“The blood?” Juno choked out.

“If you would like to see me alive to assist you in cleaning it off your couch, I would suggest you quit asking silly questions,” Nureyev bit.

On a better day, Juno would have snapped out a response. He might have had the energy to be angry on his own behalf, perhaps defending himself or trying to quiet Nureyev before the exertion drove him to further injury. However, with a few deaths too many dragging on his shoulders, a great, unseen weight tugging at his eye sockets, and his plans of drinking the evening away thoroughly dashed, he took a breath and nodded.

“What do you need my help with?” Bloomed past his lips in place of a barbed response, and Nureyev, lit in half shadow by the flickering lamp, deflated.

“Well, it seems I’ve come across a minor injury—“

Juno broke him off with a shake of his head as he strode forwards, every step slow and calculated, as if approaching an injured animal instead of a man.

“You wouldn’t be here if it was minor.”

Nureyev swallowed, suddenly finding the lamp incredibly interesting and focusing his gaze there instead. Juno felt a twinge of something that might have been a cold and bitter gratefulness at the base of his throat, for he doubted he could meet those sharp eyes ever again, even if he wanted to.

“Perhaps not,” Nureyev returned dryly.

“What happened?” Juno finally huffed upon falling to his knees at the couch’s side, dragging a spare first aid kit out from underneath.

“I was stabbed.”

Juno was almost certain that if a single word more blossomed past Nureyev’s lips, it would burn terribly. However, the sound of him choked and succinct, doing his best to swallow an injury that had caked the room in the stench of blood the same way Rex Glass had once left a ghost of his cologne was nearly worse.

“And you couldn’t go to a hospital?”

Juno hadn’t meant to sound accusatory, but from the way Nureyev’s lip had spent the entire conversation curled and the way he turned his torso away when Juno got close, he doubted there was a single place across the galaxy Nureyev wouldn’t rather be.

“If you’ll note the trail of blood across the floor, detective, I was particularly low on options,” Nureyev hissed.

“Well, if you’re gonna use this option, you’re gonna have to let me see the injury,” Juno huffed. 

When Nureyev didn’t move, he inched one hand closer, laying it atop a fold in the blanket Nureyev had stolen to use as a shield. Nureyev winced and he ripped his hand away, though after a moment, he let out a breath, squeezed his eyes shut, and nodded.

“There you go,” Juno returned softly, quelling the supportive smile that tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Can you give me a one to ten?”

“I don’t want to think about it,” Nureyev shot back with all the strength he had to do so.

Juno’s stomach turned before he could even get a good look at the mark. Once he had finished clapping a hand over his mouth and taking a deep breath to pretend his head wasn’t spinning and the warm orange light of the lamp hadn’t turned jaundiced, he blinked and began to categorize everything he knew about the injury.

The wound was one of the deepest he’d seen since his days of choking his way through slideshows at the police academy, and from the looks of the blood staining the front of Nureyev’s button down like tears into a sympathetic shoulder, the blade hadn’t done him the service of cauterizing it.

“I think I might have to do some stitches,” Juno explained aloud, trying to remember any scrap of bedside manner from his basic training in first aid.

“Then do them,” Nureyev bit.

“Yeah, yeah, hold on,” Juno murmured as his hands went flying to the first aid kit, scrambling with a panic ill suited for the patter of Hyperion’s dome crying itself to sleep and the gentle blanket of dark surrounding them, save for the nearby lamplight, all too reminiscent of Juno and Benten’s days of hiding flashlights under felted forts so they could stay up a few hours later back in those days when the waking world had been kinder than sleep.

“I don’t have much time to hold on, Juno,” Nureyev hissed, and even through words were rendered tense by pain, something in Juno’s chest shattered at the sound of his tongue and lips anointing the name in a way Juno had forgotten he was able to do.

Juno’s hand closed around the tool, and despite Nureyev’s assertion, he still looked up to his face for some sign of permission, for something cold and bitter at the back of his head warned that if he so much as touched Nureyev, he ran the risk of infecting him somehow, ruining him the way he had ruined his last case.

Nureyev let out a breath and, as if it were the hardest thing in the world to do, met his eye.

“You don’t need to ask permission, Juno.”

Juno swallowed and nodded before those sharp and lovely eyes could burn a hole through his sternum and bare the cold and empty space between his ribs to the rest of the world.

He forced the thought aside and brought the tool up to the injury, wincing with every snap and hiss of the metal as the stitches wove the gaping wound shut. Nureyev let out nothing more than a ghost of a pained noise, quieted behind the one hand that had managed to remain bloodless throughout the entire ordeal.

Juno wanted nothing more than to whisper sweet nothings and kiss his forehead and tell him how strong he was just for surviving at all. He wanted to tear the hand from his mouth and kiss the back of it the way Nureyev used to kiss his hands, just to repay some iota of the veneration he had never deserved. He wanted their hands to brush and their lips to meet and their foreheads to come together as he murmured something soft and sweet about taking care of Nureyev and making sure he never hurt like this again.

But Juno had given up all those things when he left that hotel room half a year ago.

The right to comfort Peter Nureyev was a right reserved for better people, so when he unbuttoned the rest of Nureyev’s shirt to wrap his torso in bandages, Juno made a point of feeling nothing. It wasn’t particularly difficult, he supposed. Just more of the usual.

When he finished, he did not press a kiss to Nureyev’s hip or fix his hair or let his gaze linger upon the bloodied bandages, as if regret could heal a stab wound. He couldn’t be entirely sure if Nureyev was grateful for that or not.

“If you wanna sleep somewhere more comfortable—”

“I’d hate to make you go to the trouble of redoing your bedsheets just because I bled on them,” Nureyev cut him off. “I’ll take the couch.”

“But—”

“Groveling won’t change what you did to me, Juno.”

Even if Nureyev had entirely turned away, nestled into the couch cushions and pulling the blanket tight around the shoulder, the sentence stung with all the barb of those sharp and boring eyes, their glare a potent reminder of how softly they had once looked upon him.

Juno opened his mouth to speak and closed it. He tried again. He failed. That stung too, and perhaps a toothpick wasn’t much to add to a pyre, but the tiny, useless moment in which he sat on his knees at Peter Nureyev’s side, utterly useless, was all his brain needed to make his head go numb and his chest go cold and his mouth go a little too dry for his liking.

“Go to bed, dear,” Nureyev murmured into his blankets.

“I’m not leaving you alone,” Juno replied as flatly as he could manage.

“Then sleep on the floor.”

If Juno had been a little less frayed at the edges, he might have spat upon the remark, returning with his own barb and prodding Nureyev into enough of a fight that he felt he had been sufficiently hurt for the evening and had managed to earn some slice of absolution for what he had done. However, between the sweet nothings of the city he had left Nureyev for and the familiar sounds of his pained breathing that had been his lullaby in a Martian tomb a million years ago, Juno didn’t have the energy to do much more than turn off the lamp and rest his head upon the couch cushion.

Somewhere between waking and sleep, he could have almost sworn he felt clever, familiar hands propping his head up to slide a throw pillow behind it.

When Juno awoke the next morning, Peter Nureyev was gone. He supposed it was only fair.

The only sign he’d been there at all was a bottle of cleaning product propped up against a nearby wall, a remnant of the work that had scrubbed the floors clean of Nureyev’s blood. The blanket too was washed, and judging by its warmth when Juno realized it had been wrapped around his shoulders, recently dried.

He could have died there, warm and half asleep and almost comfortable. However, he had a new bottle to christen and a reason to drink a toast or three to Peter Nureyev, the ghost who had left nothing but his cologne to haunt Juno’s apartment in retaliation.

For his own sake, Juno told himself it was a dream. He was probably better off that way.

**Author's Note:**

> hoo boy. owie
> 
> Thank you all so much for reading!! Make sure to SMASH that kudos button and leave a comment down below or ill tell my mom
> 
> Check me out on tumblr @hopeless-eccentric or on twitter @withane22 !!


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